Castration or Decapitation? Helene Cixous ... - Aaron Van Dyke

Castration or Decapitation?
Helene Cixous; Annette Kuhn
Signs, Vol. 7, No.1 (Autumn, 1981),41-55.
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Castration or Decapitation?
Helene Cixous
Translated by Annette Kuhn
On sexual difference: Let's start with these small points. One day Zeus
and Hera, the ultimate couple, in the course of one of their intermittent
and thoroughgoing disagreements-which today would be of the
greatest interest to psychoanalysts-called on Tiresias to arbitrate.
Tiresias, the blind seer who had enjoyed the uncommon fortune of
having lived seven years as a woman and seven years as a man.
He was gifted with second sight. Second sight in a sense other than
we might usually understand it: it isn't simply that as a prophet he could
see into the future. He could also see it from both sides: from the side of
the male and from the side of the female.
The subject of the disagreement was the question of sexual pleasure:
"Of man and woman, who enjoys the greater pleasure?" Obviously
neither Zeus nor Hera could answer this without giving their own answer,
which they saw would be inadequate, since the ancients made
fewer assumptions than we do about the possibility of making such
identifications. So it carne about that Tiresias was sought, as the only
person who could know "which of the two." And Tiresias answered: "If
sexual pleasure could be divided up into ten parts, nine of them would
be the woman's." Nine. It's no coincidence that Tiresias makes another
This article first appeared as "Le Sexe ou la tete?"inLes Cahiers du GRIF, no. 13 (1976),
pp. 5-15. The text was transcribed from a conversation between Helene Cixous and the
editors of Les Cahiers du GRIF which took place in Brussels during 1975. The present
translation follows the published transcript with two exceptions (signaled in nn. 4 and 5)
and is published with the permission of Helene Cixous. The approach and arguments are
developed in Cixous's more recent work. See, e.g., Vivre l'orange (Paris: Editions des
femmes, 1979), written in French and English, and Illa (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1980).
Thanks are due to to Elaine Marks for suggesting this translation of the title, to Keith
Cohen for advice on specific points of translation, and to Chris Holmlund for bibliographical
assistance.
[Signs: J

42 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
appearance in none other than the oedipal scene. It was Tiresias who, at
Oedipus's command, reminded Oedipus that blindness was his master,
and Tiresias who, so they say, "made the scales fall from his eyes" and
showed Oedipus who he really was. We should note that these things are
all linked together and bear some relation to the question "What is
woman for man?"
It reminds me of a little Chinese story. Every detail of this story
counts. I've borrowed it from a very serious text, Sun Tse's manual of
strategy, which is a kind of handbook for the warrior. This is the anecdote.
The king commanded General Sun Tse: "You who are a great
strategist and claim to be able to train anybody in the arts of war. ... take
my wives (all one hundred and eighty of them!) and make soldiers out of
them." We don't know why the king conceived this desire-it's the one
thing we don't know .... it remains precisely "un(re)countable" or unaccountable
in the story. But it is a king's wish, after all.
So Sun Tse had the women arranged in two rows, each headed by
one of the two favorite wives, and then taught them the language of the
drumbeat. It was very simple: two beats-right, three beats-left, four
beats-about turn or backward march. But instead of learning the code
very quickly, the ladies started laughing and chattering and paying no
attention to the lesson, and Sun Tse, the master, repeated the lesson
several times over. But the more he spoke, the more the women fell
about laughing, upon which Sun Tse put his code to the test. It is said in
this code that should women fall about laughing instead of becoming
soldiers, their actions might be deemed mutinous, and the code has
ordained that cases of mutiny call for the death penalty. So the women
were condemned to death. This bothered the king somewhat: a hundred
and eighty wives are a lot to lose! He didn't want his wives put to death.
But Sun Tse replied that since he was put in charge of making soldiers
out of the women, he would carry out the order: Sun Tse was a man of
absolute principle. And in any case there's an order even more "royal"
than that of the king himself: the Absolute Law .... One does not go
back on an order. He therefore acted according to the code and with his
saber beheaded the two women commanders. They were replaced and
the exercise started again, and as if they had never done anything except
practice the art of war, the women turned right, left, and about in silence
and with never a single mistake.
It's hard to imagine a more perfect example of a particular relationship
between two economies: a masculine economy and a feminine
economy, in which the masculine is governed by a rule that keeps time
with two beats, three beats, four beats, with pipe and drum, exactly as it
should be. An order that works by inculcation, by education: it's always a
question of education. An education that consists of trying to make a
soldier of the feminine by force, the force history keeps reserved for
woman, the "capital" force that is effectively decapitation. Women have
no choice other than to be decapitated, and in any case the moral is that

Signs Autumn 1981 43
if they don't actually lose their heads by the sword, they only keep them on
condition that they lose them-lose them, that is, to complete silence, turned
into automatons.
It's a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability
to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation. If
man operates under the threat of castration, if masculinity is culturally
ordered by the castration complex, it might be said that the backlash, the
return, on women of this castration anxiety is its displacement as decapitation,
execution, of woman, as loss of her head.
We are led to pose the woman question to history in quite elementary
forms like, "Where is she? Is there any such thing as woman?" At
worst, many women wonder whether they even exist. They feel they
don't exist and wonder if there has ever been a place for them. I am
speaking of woman's place,from woman's place, if she takes (a) place.
In La Jeune Nee! I made use of a story that seemed to me particularly
expressive of woman's place: the story of Sleeping Beauty. Woman, if
you look for her, has a strong chance of always being found in one
position: in bed. In bed and asleep--"laid (out)." She is always to be
found on or in a bed: Sleeping Beauty is lifted from her bed by a man
because, as we all know, women don't wake up by themselves: man has to
intervene, you understand. She is lifted up by the man who will lay her in
her next bed so that she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the
fairy tales say.
And so her trajectory is from bed to bed: one bed to another, where
she can dream all the more. There are some extraordinary analyses by
Kierkegaard on women's "existence"--or that part of it set aside for her
by culture-in which he says he sees her as sleeper. She sleeps, he says,
and first love dreams her and then she dreams of love. From dream to
dream, and always in second position. In some stories, though, she can
be found standing up, but not for long. Take Little Red Riding Hood as
an example: it will not, I imagine, be lost on you that the "red riding
hood" in question is a little clitoris. Little Red Riding Hood basically gets
up to some mischief: she's the little female sex that tries to playa bit and
sets out with her little pot of butter and her little jar of honey. What is
interesting is that it's her mother who gives them to her and sends her on
an excursion that's tempting precisely because it's forbidden: Little Red
Riding Hood leaves one house, mommy's house, not to go out into the
big wide world but to go from one house to another by the shortest route
possible: to make haste, in other words, from the mother to the other.
The other in this case is grandmother, whom we might imagine as taking
the place of the "Great Mother," because there are great men but no
great women: there are Grand-Mothers instead. And grandmothers are
always wicked: she is the bad mother who always shuts the daughter in
1. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, La J eune Nee (Paris: 10/18, 1975 )(translator's
note).

Signs Autumn 1981 45
I said it turns on the Word: we must take culture at its word, as it
takes us into its Word, into its tongue. You'll understand why I think that
no political reflection can dispense with reflection on language, with
work on language. For as soon as we exist, we are born into language and
language speaks (to) us, dictates its law, a law of death: it lays down its
familial model, lays down its conjugal model, and even at the moment of
uttering a sentence, admitting a notion of "being," a question of being,
an ontology, we are already seized by a certain kind of masculine desire,
the desire that mobilizes philosophical discourse. As soon as the question
"What is it?" is posed, from the moment a question is put, as soon as a
reply is sought, we are already caught up in masculine interrogation. I say
"masculine interrogation": as we say so-and-so was interrogated by the
police. And this interrogation precisely involves the work of signification:
"What is it? Where is it?" A work of meaning, "This means that,"
the predicative distribution that always at the same time orders the constitution
of meaning. And while meaning is being constituted, it only gets
constituted in a movement in which one of the terms of the couple is
destroyed in favor of the other.
"Look for the lady," as they say in the stories .... "Cherchez la
femme"-we always know that means: you'll find her in bed. Another
question that's posed in History, rather a strange question, a typical male
question, is: "What do women want?" The Freudian question, of course.
In his work on desire, Freud asks somewhere, or rather doesn't ask,
leaves hanging in the air, the question "What do women want?" Let's talk
a bit about this desire and about why/how the question "What do women
want?" gets put, how it's both posed and left hanging in the air by
philosophical discourse, by analytic discourse (analytic discourse being
only one province of philosophical discourse), and how it is posed, let us
say, by the Big Bad Wolf and the Grand-Mother.
"What does she want?" Little Red Riding Hood knew quite well what
she wanted, but Freud's question is not what it seems: it's a rhetorical
question. To pose the question "What do women want?" is to pose it
already as answer, as from a man who isn't expecting any answer, because
the answer is "She wants nothing." ... "What does she want? ...
Nothing!" Nothing because she is passive. The only thing man can do is
offer the question "What could she want, she who wants nothing?" Or in
other words: "Without me, what could she want?"
Old Lacan takes up the slogan "What does she want?" when he says,
"A woman cannot speak of her pleasure." Most interesting! It's all there,
a woman cannot, is unable, hasn't the power. Not to mention "speaking":
it's exactly this that she's forever deprived of. Unable to speak of pleasure
= no pleasure, no desire: power, desire, speaking, pleasure, none of
these is for woman. And as a quick reminder of how this works in
theoretical discourse, one question: you are aware, of course, that for
Freud/Lacan, woman is said to be "outside the Symbolic": outside the

46 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
Symbolic, that is outside language, the place of the Law, excluded from
any possible relationship with culture and the cultural order. And she is
outside the Symbolic because she lacks any relation to the phallus, because
she does not enjoy what orders masculinity-the castration complex.
Woman does not have the advantage of the castration complexit's
reserved solely for the little boy. The phallus, in Lacanian parlance
also called the "transcendental signifier," transcendental precisely as
primary organizer of the structure of subjectivity, is what, for
psychoanalysis, inscribes its effects, its effects of castration and resistance
to castration and hence the very organization of language, as unconscious
relations, and so it is the phallus that is said to constitute the a
priori condition of all symbolic functioning. This has important implications
as far as the body is concerned: the body is not sexed, does not
recognize itself as, say, female or male without having gone through the
castration complex.
What psychoanalysis points to as defining woman is that she lacks
lack. She lacks lack? Curious to put it in so contradictory, so extremely
paradoxical, a manner: she lacks lack. To say she lacks lack is also, after
all, to say she doesn't miss lack ... since she doesn't miss the lack of lack.
Yes, they say, but the point is "she lacks The Lack," The Lack, lack of the
Phallus. And so, supposedly, she misses the great lack, so that without
man she would be indefinite, indefinable, nonsexed, unable to recognize
herself: outside the Symbolic. But fortunately there is man: he who
comes ... Prince Charming. And it's man who teaches woman (because
man is always the Master as well), who teaches her to be aware oflack, to
be aware of absence, aware of death. It's man who will finally order
woman, "set her to rights," by teaching her that without man she could
"misrecognize." He will teach her the Law of the Father. Something of
the order of: "Without me, without me-the Absolute-Father (the
father is always that much more absolute the more he is improbable,
dubious)-without me you wouldn't exist, I'll show you." Without him
she'd remain in a state of distressing and distressed undifferentiation,
unbordered, unorganized, "unpoliced" by the phallus ... incoherent,
chaotic, and embedded in the Imaginary in her ignorance of the Law of
the Signifier. Without him she would in all probability not be contained
by the threat of death, might even, perhaps, believe herself eternal,
immortal. Without him she would be deprived of sexuality. And it might
be said that man works very actively to produce "his woman." Take for
example Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,2 and you will witness the moment
when man can finally say "his" woman, "my" woman. It is that moment
when he has taught her to be aware of Death. So man makes, he makes
2. Marguerite Duras, Le Ravissement tk Lot V. Stein (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). There are
two English translations of this work: The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, trans. Richard Seaver
(New York: Grove Press, 1966), and The Rapture of Lot V. Stein, trans. Eileen Ellenbogen
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967) (translator's note).

Signs Autumn 1981 47
(up) his woman, not without being himself seized up and drawn into the
dialectical movement that this sort of thing sets in play. We might say
that the Absolute Woman, in culture, the woman who really represents
femininity most effectively . . . who is closest to femininity as prey to
masculinity, is actually the hysteric. ... he makes her image for her!
The hysteric is a divine spirit that is always at the edge, the turning
point, of making. She is one who does not make herself ... she does not
make herself but she does make the other. It is said that the hysteric
"makes-believe" the father, plays the father, "makes-believe" the master.
Plays, makes up, makes-believe: she makes-believe she is a woman,
unmakes-believe too ... plays at desire, plays the father ... turns herself
into him, unmakes him at the same time. Anyway, without the hysteric,
there's no father ... without the hysteric, no master, no analyst, no
analysis! She's the unorganiwble feminine construct, whose power of
producing the other is a power that never returns to her. She is really a
wellspring nourishing the other for eternity, yet not drawing back from
the other ... not recognizing herself in the images the other mayor may
not give her. She is given images that don't belong to her, and she forces
herself, as we've all done, to resemble them.
And so in the face of this person who lacks lack, who does not miss
lack of lack, we have the construct that is infinitely easier to analyze, to
put in place-manhood, flaunting its metaphors like banners through
history. You know those metaphors: they are most effective. It's always
clearly a question of war, of battle. If there is no battle, it's replaced by
the stake of battle: strategy. Man is strategy, is reckoning ... "how to
win" with the least possible loss, at the lowest possible cost. Throughout
literature masculine figures all say the same thing: "I'm reckoning" what
to do to win. Take Don Juan and you have the whole masculine economy
getting together to "give women just what it takes to keep them in bed"
then swiftly taking back the investment, then reinvesting, etc., so that
nothing ever gets given, everything gets taken back, while in the process
the greatest possible dividend of pleasure is taken. Consumption without
payment, of course.
Let's take an example other than Don Juan, one clearly pushed to
the point of paroxysm ... Kafka. It was Kafka who said there was one
struggle that terrified him beyond all others (he was an embattled man,
but his battle was with death-in this sense he was a man greater than the
rest): but in matters concerning women his was a struggle that terrified
him (death did not). He said the struggle with women ended up in bed:
this was his greatest fear. If you know a little about Kafka's life you
should know that in his complete integrity, his absolute honesty, he
attempted to live through this awful anguish in his relationships with
women, in the struggle whose only outcome is bed, by working ... finally
to produce a neurosis of quite extraordinary beauty and terror consisting
of a life-and-death relationship with a woman, but at the greatest

48 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
possible distance. As close as possible and as distanced as possible. He
would be betrothed, passionately desire a marriage which he feared
above all else, and keep putting off the wedding by endless unconscious
maneuvers ... by a pattern of repeated breakups that took him right to
his deathbed, the very deathbed he'd always wanted-a bed, that is, in
which he could finally be alone with death. This work of keeping women
at a distance while at the same time drawing them to him shows up
strikingly in his diary, again because Kafka was honest enough to reveal
everything, to say everything. He wrote in little columns, putting debits
on the left and credits on the right ... all the reasons I absolutely must
marry, all the reasons I absolutely must not. This tension points to the
spirit of male/female relationships in a way it isn't normally revealed,
because what is normally revealed is actually a decoy ... all those words
about love, etc. All that is always just a cover for hatred nourished by the
fear of death: woman, for man, is death. This is actually the castration
complex at its most effective: giving is really dicing with death.
Giving: there you have a basic problem, which is that masculinity is
always associated-in the unconscious, which is after all what makes the
whole economy function-with debt. Freud, in deciphering the latent
antagonisms between parents and children, shows very well the extent to
which the family is founded, as far as the little boy is concerned, on a
fearful debt. The child owes his parents his life and his problem is exactly
to repay them: nothing is more dangerous than obligation. Obligation is
submission to the enormous weight of the other's generosity, is being
threatened by a blessing ... and a blessing is always an evil when it comes
from someone else. For the moment you receive something you are
effectively "open" to the other, and if you are a man you have only one
wish, and that is hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an
exchange that could have no end ... to be nobody's child, to owe no one
a thing.
And so debt, what is always expressed in religions by laws like "a
tooth for a tooth," "a gift for a gift," "an eye for an eye," is a system of
absolute equivalence ... of no inequality, for inequality is always interpreted
by the masculine as a difference of strength, and thus as a threat.
This economy is ruled by price: there's a price to pay, life is dear, the
price of life has to be paid. And here lies a difficulty in connection with
love, in that, at coming, love starts escaping the system of equivalence in
all sorts of ways. It's very hard to give back something you can't pin
down. What's so frightening in relations between male and female at the
moment of coming (au niveau de La jouissance) is the possibility that there
might be more on one side than on the other and the Symbolic finds it
really tough to know who wins and who loses, who gives more in a
relationship of this sort. The memory of debt and the fear of having to
recognize one's debt rise up straightaway. But the refusal to know is
nonetheless ambivalent in its implications, for not knowing is threaten-

Signs Autumn 1981 49
ing while at the same time (and this is where the castration complex
comes in) it reinforces the desire to know. So in the end woman, in man's
desire, stands in the place of not knowing, the place of mystery. In this
sense she is no good, but at the same time she is good because it's this
mystery that leads man to keep overcoming, dominating, subduing, putting
his manhood to the test, against the mystery he has to keep forcing
back.
And so they want to keep woman in the place of mystery, consign
her to mystery, as they say "keep her in her place," keep her at a distance:
she's always not quite there ... but no one knows exactly where
she is. She is kept in place in a quite characteristic way-coming back to
Oedipus, the place of one who is too often forgotten,3 the place of the
sphinx ... she's kept in the place of what we might call the "watch-bitch"
(chienne chanteuse). That is to say, she is outside the city, at the edge of the
city-the city is man, ruled by masculine law-and there she is. In what
way is she there? She is there not recognizing: the sphinx doesn't recognize
herself, she it is who poses questions, just as it's man who holds
the answer and furthermore, as you know, his answer is completely
worthy of him: "Man," simple answer ... but it says everything.
"Watch-bitch," the sphinx was called: she's an animal and she sings out.
She sings out because women do ... they do utter a little, but they don't
speak. Always keep in mind the distinction between speaking and talking.
It is said, in philosophical texts, that women's weapon is the word,
because they talk, talk endlessly, chatter, overflow with sound, mouthsound:
but they don't actually speak, they have nothing to say. They
always inhabit the place of silence, or at most make it echo with their
singing. And neither is to their benefit, for they remain outside knowledge.
Silence: silence is the matk of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost
speech, they are aphonic, and at times have lost more than speech: they
are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets through. They are
decapitated, their tongues are cut off and what talks isn't heard because
it's the body that talks, and man doesn't hear the body. In the end, the
woman pushed to hysteria is the woman who disturbs and is nothing but
disturbance. The master dotes on disturbance right from the moment he
can subdue it and call it up at his command. Conversely the hysteric is
the woman who cannot not ask the master what he wants her to want:
she wants nothing, truly she wants nothing. She wants ... she wants to
want. But what is it she wants to want? So she goes to school: she asks the
master: "What should I want?" and "What do you want me to want, so
that I might want it?" Which is what happens in analysis.
3. "La place de celie qu'on oublie en franc;;ais trop souvent parce qu'on dit 'sphinx' au
lieu de 'sphinge"': That is, the French form of the word would suggest that the sphinx is
male, whereas the sphinx of the oedipal myth is in fact female (translator's note).

50 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
Let's imagine that all this functioned otherwise, that it could function
otherwise. We'd first have to imagine resistance to masculine desire
conducted by woman as hysteric, as distracted. We'd first have to imagine
her ceasing to support with her body what I call the realm of the
proper. The realm of the proper in the sense of the general cultural
heterosocial establishment in which man's reign is held to be proper:
proper may be the opposite of improper, and also of unfitting, just as
black and white are opposites. Etymologically, the "proper" is "property,"
that which is not separable from me. Property is proximity, nearness:
we must love our neighbors, those close to us, as ourselves: we must
draw close to the other so that we may love him/her, because we love
ourselves most of all. The realm of the proper, culture, functions by the
appropriation articulated, set into play, by man's classic fear of seeing
himself expropriated, seeing himself deprived ... by his refusal to be
deprived, in a state of separation, by his fear of losing the prerogative,
fear whose response is all of History. Everything must return to the
masculine. "Return": the economy is founded on a system of returns. If
a man spends and is spent, it's on condition that his power returns. If a
man should go out, if he should go out to the other, it's always done
according to the Hegelian model, the model of the master-slave dialectic.
Woman would then have to start by resisting the movement of reappropriation
that rules the whole economy, by being party no longer to
the masculine return, but by proposing instead a desire no longer caught
up in the death struggle, no longer implicated in the reservation and
reckoning of the masculine economy, but breaking with the reckoning
that "I never lose anything except to win a bit more" ... so as to put aside
all negativeness and bring out a positiveness which might be called the
living other, the rescued other, the other unthreatened by destruction.
Women have it in them to organize this regeneration, this vitalization of
the other, of otherness in its entirety. They have it in them to affirm the
difference, their difference, such that nothing can destroy that difference,
rather that it might be affirmed, affirmed to the point of
strangeness. So much so that when sexual difference, when the preservation
or dissolution of sexual difference, is touched on, the whole
problem of destroying the strange, destroying all the forms of racism, all
the exclusions, all those instances of outlaw and genocide that recur
through History, is also touched on. Ifwomen were to set themselves to
transform History, it can safely be said that every aspect of History
would be completely altered. Instead of being made by man, History's
task would be to make woman, to produce her. And it's at this point that
work by women themselves on women might be brought into play, which
would benefit not only women but all humanity.
But first she would have to speak, start speaking, stop saying that she
has nothing to say! Stop learning in school that women are created to

Signs Autumn 1981 51
listen, to believe, to make no discoveries. Dare to speak her piece about
giving, the possibility of a giving that doesn't take away, but gives. Speak
of her pleasure and, God knows, she has something to say about that, so
that she gets to unblock a sexuality that's just as much feminine as masculine,
"de-phallocentralize" the body, relieve man of his phallus, return
him to an erogenous field and a libido that isn't stupidly organized
round that monument, but appears shifting, diffused, taking on all the
others of oneself. Very difficult: first we have to get rid of the systems of
censorship that bear down on every attempt to speak in the feminine.
We have to get rid of and also explain what all knowledge brings with it
as its burden of power: to show in what ways, culturally, knowledge is the
accomplice of power: that whoever stands in the place of knowledge is
always getting a dividend of power: show that all thinking until now has
been ruled by this dividend, this surplus value of power that comes back
to him who knows. Take the philosophers, take their position of mastery,
and you'll see that there is not a soul who dares to make an advance in
thought, into the as-yet-unthought, without shuddering at the idea that
he is under the surveillance of the ancestors, the grandfathers, the tyrants
of the concept, without thinking that there behind your back is
always the famous Name-of-the-Father, who knows whether or not
you're writing whatever it is you have to write without any spelling mistakes.
Now, I think that what women will have to do and what they will do,
right from the moment they venture to speak what they have to say, will
of necessity bring about a shift in metalanguage. And I think we're
completely crushed, expecially in places like universities, by the highly
repressive operations of metalanguage, the operations, that is, of the
commentary on the commentary, the code, the operation that sees to it
that the moment women open their mouths-women more often than
men-they are immediately asked in whose name and from what
theoretical standpoint they are speaking, who is their master and where
they are coming from: they have, in short, to salute ... and show their
identity papers. There's work to be done against class, against categorization,
against classification--classes. "Doing classes" in France means
doing military service. There's work to be done against military service,
against all schools, against the pervasive masculine urge to judge, diagnose,
digest, name ... not so much in the sense of the loving precision
of poetic naming as in that of the repressive censorship of philosophical
nomination/conceptualization.
Women who write have for the most part until now considered
themselves to be writing not as women but as writers. Such women may
declare that sexual difference means nothing, that there's no attributable
difference between masculine and feminine writing .... What does it
mean to "take no position"? When someone says "I'm not political" we all

52 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
know what that means! It's just another way of saying: "My politics are
someone else's!" And it's exactly the case with writing! Most women are
like this: they do someone else's---man's---writing, and in their innocence
sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that's in effect
masculine. Great care must be taken in working on feminine writing not
to get trapped by names: to be signed with a woman's name doesn't
necessarily make a piece of writing feminine. It could quite well be
masculine writing, and conversely, the fact that a piece of writing is
signed with a man's name does not in itself exclude femininity. It's rare,
but you can sometimes find femininity in writings signed by men: it does
happen.
Which texts appear to be woman-texts and are recognized as such
today, what can this mean, how might they be read?4 In my opinion, the
writing being done now that I see emerging around me won't only be of
the kinds that exist in print today, though they will always be with us, but
will be something else as well. In particular we ought to be prepared for
what I call the "affirmation of the difference," not a kind of wake about
the corpse of the mummified woman, nor a fantasy of woman's decapitation,
but something different: a step forward, an adventure, an
exploration of woman's powers: of her power, her potency, her everdreaded
strength, of the regions of femininity. Things are starting to be
written, things that will constitute a feminine Imaginary, the site, that is,
of identifications of an ego no longer given over to an image defined by
the masculine ("like the woman I love, I mean a dead woman"), but
rather inventing forms for women on the march, or as I prefer to fantasize,
"in flight," so that instead of lying down, women will go forward
by leaps in search of themselves.
There is work to be done on female sexual pleasure and on the
production of an unconscious that would no longer be the classic unconscious.
The unconscious is always cultural and when it talks it tells
you your old stories, it tells you the old stories you've heard before
because it consists of the repressed of culture. But it's also always shaped
by the forceful return of a libido that doesn't give up that easily, and also
by what is strange, what is outside culture, by a language which is a
savage tongue that can make itself understood quite well. This is why, I
think, political and not just literary work is started as soon as writing gets
4. There follows in the original a passage in which several categories of women's
writing existing at the time (1975) are listed and discussed. These include: "'the little girl's
story,' where the little girl is getting even for a bad childhood," "texts of a return to a
woman's own body," and texts which were a critical success, "ones about madwomen,
deranged, sick women." The passage is omitted here, at the author's request, on the
grounds that such a categorization is outdated, and that the situation with regard to
women's writing is very much different now than it was five or six years ago (translator's
note).

Signs Autumn 1981 53
done by women that goes beyond the bounds of censorship, reading, the
gaze, the masculine command, in that cheeky risk taking women can get
into when they set out into the unknown to look for themselves.
This is how I would define a feminine textual body: as a female
libidinal economy, a regime, energies, a system of spending not necessarily
carved out by culture. A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact
that it is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't
stop, and it's this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to
read. For we've learned to read books that basically pose the word "end."
But this one doesn't finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at a
certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues
and for the reader this means being thrust into the void. These are texts
that work on the beginning but not on the origin. The origin is a masculine
myth: I always want to know where I come from. The question
"Where do children come from?" is basically a masculine, much more
than a feminine, question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus,
doesn't haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it's the beginning, or beginnings,
the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in
order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that
makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once,
starts twenty times, thirty times, over.
The question a woman's text asks is the question of giving-"What
does this writing give?" "How does it give?" And talking about nonorigin
and beginnings, you might say it "gives a send-off" (donne le depart). Let's
take the expression "giving a send-off" in a metaphorical sense: giving a
send-off is generally giving the signal to depart. I think it's more than
giving the departure signal, it's really giving, making ap;ift of, departure,
allowing departure, allowing breaks, "parts," partings, separations ...
from this we break with the return-to-self, with the specular relations
ruling the coherence, the identification, of the individual. When a
woman writes in nonrepression she passes on her others, her abundance
of non-ego/s in a way that destroys the form of the family structure, so
that it is defamilialized, can no longer be thought in terms of the attribution
of roles within a social cell: what takes place is an endless circulation
of desire from one body to another, above and across sexual difference,
outside those relations of power and regeneration constituted by the
family. I believe regeneration leaps, age leaps, time leaps .... A
woman-text gets across a detachment, a kind of disengagement, not the
detachment that is immediately taken back, but a real capacity to lose
hold and let go. This takes the metaphorical form of wandering, excess,
risk of the unreckonable: no reckoning, a feminine text can't be predicted,
isn't predictable, isn't knowable and is therefore very disturbing.
It can't be anticipated, and I believe femininity is written outside anticipation:
it really is the text of the unforeseeable.

54 Cixous Castration or Decapitation?
Let's look not at syntax but at fantasy, at the unconscious: all the
feminine texts I've read are very close to the voice, very close to the flesh
of language, much more so than masculine texts ... perhaps because
there's something in them that's freely given, perhaps because they don't
rush into meaning, but are straightway at the threshold of feeling.
There's tactility in the feminine text, there's touch, and this touch passes
through the ear. Writing in the feminine is passing on what is cut out by
the Symbolic, the voice of the mother, passing on what is most archaic.
The most archaic force that touches a body is one that enters by the ear
and reaches the most intimate point. This innermost touch always echoes
in a woman-text. So the movement, the movement of the text, doesn't
trace a straight line. I see it as an outpouring ... which can appear in
primitive or elementary texts as a fantasy of blood, of menstrual flow,
etc., but which I prefer to see as vomiting, as "throwing up," "disgorging."
And I'd link this with a basic structure of property relations defined
by mourning.
Man cannot live without resigning himself to loss. He has to mourn.
It's his way of withstanding castration. He goes through castration, that
is, and by sublimation incorporates the lost object. Mourning, resigning
oneself to loss, means not losing. When you've lost something and the
loss is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of your self
might be lost in the lost object. So you "mourn," you make haste to
recover the investment made in the lost object. But I believe women do
not mourn, and this is where their pain lies! When you've mourned, it's all
over after a year, there's no more suffering. Woman, though, does not
mourn, does not resign herself to loss. She basically takes up the challenge
of loss in order to go on living: she lives it, gives it life, is capable of
unsparing loss. She does not hold onto loss, she loses without holding
onto loss. This makes her writing a body that overflows, disgorges, vomiting
as opposed to masculine incorporation .... She loses, and doubtless
it would be to the death were it not for the intervention of those basic
movements of a feminine unconscious (this is how I would define
feminine sublimation) which provide the capacity of passing above it all by
means of a form of oblivion which is not the oblivion of burial or interment
but the oblivion of acceptance. This is taking loss, seizing it, living it.
Leaping. This goes with not withholding: she does not withhold. She
does not withhold, hence the impression of constant return evoked by
this lack of withholding. It's like a kind of open memory that ceaselessly
makes way. And in the end, she will write this not-witholding, this
not-writing: she writes of not-writing, not-happening .... She crosses
limits: she is neither outside nor in, whereas the masculine would try to
"bring the outside in, if possible."5
5. The following passage, deleted from the main body of the text, is regarded by the
author as expressing a position tangential to the central interest of her work, which has to

Signs Autumn 1981 55
And finally this open and bewildering prospect goes hand in hand
with a certain kind of laughter. Culturally speaking, women have wept a
great deal, but once the tears are shed, there will be endless laughter
instead. Laughter that breaks out, overflows, a humor no one would
expect to find in women-which is nonetheless surely their greatest
strength because it's a humor that sees man much further away than he
has ever been seen. Laughter that shakes the last chapter of my text LA, 6
"she who laughs last." And her first laugh is at herself.
do with homosexuality: "And it's this being 'neither out nor in,' being 'beyond the
outside/inside opposition' that permits the play of 'bisexuality.' Female sexuality is always at
some point bisexual. Bisexual doesn't mean, as many people think, that she can make love
with both a man and a woman, it doesn't mean she has two partners, even if it can at times
mean this. Bisexuality on an unconscious level is the possibility of extending into the other,
of being in such a relation with the other that I move into the other without destroying the
other: that I wiIllook for the other where s/he is without trying to bring everything back to
myself" (translator's note).
6. Helene Cixous, LA (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) (translator's note).